SUBJECT

All is Ablaze is a documentary that deals with the serious theme of human suffering and its role in the Buddhist philosophy.

Guided by the word of five Italian masters who dedicated their own lives to this path of knowledge originating from the East, we emerge ourselves in their teaching, a teaching able to re-awake our concentration to the mystery of life and death. We are not talking about a religion, but rather a cultural and philosophical expression, able to get in touch with people all over the world. We move forward in a difficult path that promises a solution to our suffering.

The five main characters offer an example on how this path can be undertaken. An example that includes Italian cultural tradition as well. In Italy they founded their own schools and nowadays, following those examples, the new generations experience the encounter between East and West in first person, following the Buddhist thought and inner research.

During the troubled years of the big social transformations that involved every part of the West, a more genuine openness to different cultures arose and it allowed a physical closeness among worlds once considered to be too far apart. That was felt even by ordinary people and not just scholars.

This was the historical context in which, the five future masters, each one with his own path, felt the need to find something more, «there must be something more!» something which would satisfy our own thirst for knowledge and truth. An inner passion that couldn’t be satisfied by what the surrounding world had offered or was offering them.

Engaku Taino left his job in a bank to go to a Zen monastery in Japan at the end of the sixties, where the classical monastic path was waiting for him; Mario Thanavaro and Corrado Pensa went to, respectively, England and the United States in the seventies, where the schools of the first western masters were operating; Fausto Taiten Guareschi met, in Paris, Taisen Deshimaru, the first Japanese Zen master to emigrate to Europe and Franco Bertossa, who lived an autonomous spiritual experience which he connected to that of Buddhism.

Although they encountered different Buddhist traditions, they are joined by the feeling of finally having found something definitive.

SYNOPSIS

The  main thread of an ancient Buddhist text. Strong words about the transience of everything and about the pain that we will inevitably face  along our path.

Considerations about life and death, personal and existential  situations will emerge. A mystery we all share together,  poetically  passed on to us through the eyes of five main characters.

The personality of some of the most important Italian Buddhist masters come alive. It is not an exotic path, but rather a layout of familiar words, questions, searches that everyone can relate to.

Why did they approach Buddhism and which solutions did they find in this fascinating and mysterious oriental belief system?

From the voice of the masters, emerges the echo of an ancestral push that takes  men of all generations  away from all borders and nationalities.

DIRECTOR'S NOTE

This work is an ode to the wise-madness that has dwelled in man throughout the history of the world, a feeling of unstoppable restlessness which pushes to dig deep down,  so down to discover the mystery of ourselves. We researched that special feeling meeting various Buddhist Italian masters. Their teachings are inspired by an historical figure, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), a noble and a  lord of a reign in what is present-day Nepal, who choose to abandon everything to consecrate himself to the spiritual research. At the base of his choice there was a simple and tragic observation about the human condition: it is always and inevitably ​accompanied by suffering. His path will conduct him to the cessation of such suffering, through the awakening.

In Italy, 2500 yeas after, Buddhism and West meet again, perhaps after millennia, in a cultural context where values appear to be increasingly replaced by a utilitarian thought, however, unable to respond to the needs and the deepest questions of man. Those voices are critical, they are able to raise doubts above our ideas and habits, to go further towards a cultural-pluralism, not only ideal but incarnated.

Through their own words we wanted to return their personal stories, driven by unusual paths and choices, not only as mere  geographical shifts, but also as “inner actions”, that are different answers to the same question, originated in the delicate choice of everyone’s life.

Where does the need of something more comes from? Which expressions and forms did it take in these men? Can these strongly East-oriented characters, be avantgardes representative of new values, and at the same time rare examples of a particular tie with their own traditions?